Law, the Democratic Citizen and the Representation of Women in Classical Athens
Robin Osborne
Past and Present, No. 155. (May, 1997), pp. 3-33.
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LAW, THE DEMOCRATIC CITIZEN AND THE REPRESENTATION O F WOMEN IN CLASSICAL ATHENS* Do new laws actually bring about social change? Or do they
simply reflect changes that have already taken place informally?
Greek political analysts were prone to assume that laws do change
things. The first half of the account of the Athenian constitution
written as part of an Aristotelian research project in the 320s B.C.
structures its history of the development of the constitution
according to a series of moments of reform.' Modern historians
of Athens have followed this example, with only rare attempts
to highlight the continuities uninterrupted by apparently
reforming legislation.' More recently cynicism has set in as historians have argued that many, if not all, legal changes in classical
Athens simply confirmed what had already become established
pra~tice.~
In this article I look at one particular law, passed in the middle
of the fifth century B.C., which changed the formal qualification
for Athenian citizenship to insistence upon descent from an
Athenian mother as well as an Athenian father. In the first section
of the article I review the evidence for the law and the possible
reasons for passing it. I argue that there is a strong sense in which
the law did merely reflect the possessive and exclusive attitude
towards Athenian citizenship which had already developed as
Athens acquired, and increasingly imposed her rule upon, the
* I first explored these ideas at a conference, 'Democratie athenienne et culture' in
Athens in 1992, and later developed them in a lecture at Trinity College Dublin. I
am grateful to the participants in the discussions on both occasions, and to Karen
Stears and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood for helping me to turn the ideas into this
article.
'See the summary [Aristotle], Constitution of the Athenians, 41.
See, for example, the chapter divisions of C. Hignett, A History of the Athenian
Constitution to the End of the FiJth Century B.C. (Oxford, 1952).
A clear, if trivial, example of this is provided by the law which made the Ionic
alphabet (which included eta and omega) Athens' official script, rather than the Attic
alphabet: Theopompos, 115 F155, in Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. F.
Jacoby, 16 vols. in 3 pts (Berlin and Leiden, 1923- ). Inscriptions show that Ionic
letters had been increasingly employed by official stonecutters years before the law
was brought in.
4
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
155
tribute-paying Aegean allies of what we call 'the Athenian empire'
in the years after the Persian Wars. I suggest that the evidence
for any marked effect on Athenian marriage patterns is so scant
that we would be wise to regard the law as bringing about only
limited changes in the situation with which it directly concerned
itself. In the second section, however, I argue that the law did
have important consequences, which the Athenians themselves
were unlikely to have foreseen: the law changed not who became
the wives of Athenian citizens, but how Athenian citizens thought
of their wives in particular, and of their families more generally.
In arguing this I will base my case not, primarily, on literary
sources, but on sculpted funerary monuments. I suggest that the
transformation of funerary monuments from displaying only men
to regularly and most prominently displaying women is best
understood not in terms of artistic development, nor in terms of
attitudes to death, but in terms of women's newly important
place in citizen identity. The law's insistence that citizens have
Athenian mothers led to men advertising both their mothers and
their wives in the only place where the public display of a respectable woman was acceptable: in the cemetery. The display of
women led to the display of men in a domestic context, and I
suggest that by doing so it appreciably altered the agenda for
masculinity and redefined which aspects of life were politically
relevant, moving the boundary between public and private life.
In the course of this enquiry I hope to reveal some of the ways
that political and social life were mutually implicated in classical
Athens, and to show how archaeological material can illuminate
even political aspects of Athenian history.
I
PERIKLES' CITIZENSHIP LAW AND ITS CONTEXT In 45110 B.C. the Athenians passed a measure, proposed by
Perikles, to limit citizenship to those freeborn persons whose
mothers, as well as fathers, were Athenian. This law is mentioned
by a number of ancient sources, but only the report in the
Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (26.4) attempts to explain
why such a law was passed: 'because of the number of citizen^'.^
P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeta (Oxford, 1981;
repr. with selected addenda, 1993), 331-5, 775, admirably summarizes both ancient
evidence and modern scholarship.
LAW AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN ATHENS
5
Although a recent study has attempted to show that there was
indeed a rapid increase in the number of Athenian citizens in the
decades immediately before the passage of the law,5 the
Aristotelian explanation seems unlikely to have been based on
any accurate knowledge of Athenian demographic history. In
Politics (1276a26-34), written before the Constitution of the
Athenian~,~
Aristotle posits the general rule that cities define
citizenship generously when short of men, strictly when citizen
numbers are buoyant: the explanation of Perikles' Law in the
Constitution of the Athenians may simply be an application of
this rule.7
That the Athenian citizen population grew abnormally fast
between 500 and 430 B.C. is not in itself improbable, but population growth is an inadequate explanation of Perikles' Citizenship
Law. Our best evidence for Athenian citizen numbers in the fifth
century comes from Thucydides' account (2.13) of Athenian
human resources at the outbreak of the war with Sparta in 432
B.C. A. W. Gomme long ago calculated a citizen population of
47,000 on the basis of these figures; M. H. Hansen has more
recently suggested that the figures would be compatible with a
citizen population as high as 60,000.8 Neither figure seems very
plausible for the citizen population seventy years earlier in 500
B.C., particularly if the infantry numbers at Marathon in 490 B.C.
(9,000 or 10,000)9 are compared to those given for 432 B.C.
(13,000, 'not counting the oldest and youngest'). A growth-rate
of about one per cent per annum during the first half of the fifth
century seems quite probable. That Perikles' Law was seen to
relate to population is suggested by its suspension during the
Peloponnesian War, when taking more than one wife seems to
have been legally permitted in order to maintain or increase
C. Patterson, Perikles' Citizenship Lau' of451-0 B.C. (New York, 1981). Rhodes, Corn~tlentaryon the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia, 58-61.
' Ibid., 333. As Rhodes points out, Perikles' Law does not conform to Aristotle's
other 'rule' in Politics (1319b6-ll), that democracies strengthen the popular classes
by being generous with citizenship.
A. W. Gomme, The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.
(Oxford, 1933); M. H. Hansen, 'Athenian Population Losses 431-403 B.C. and the
Number of Athenian Citizens in 431 B.C.', in M. H. Hansen (ed.), Three Studies in
Athenian De~tlography(Historisk-filosopfiske Meddelelser, lvi, Copenhagen, 1988). See
also Thucydides. History I I , ed. with trans. and commentary P. J. Rhodes (Warminster,
1988), 271-7.
9,000 Nepos, Miltiades 5.1; 10,000 Justin 11.9. Cf. Herodotos 9.28.6 and Plutarch
Aristeides 11.1: 8,000 Athenians at Plataia in 479 B.C.
6
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
155
citizen numbers. But insistence on both parents being Athenian
would have only affected the citizen population if either men
with no Athenian parent or with only a n Athenian mother had
previously been accepted as citizens, or if female infanticide in
Attica was prevalent enough to mean that after the law was passed
there were insufficient Athenian women to provide all Athenian
men with wives. Neither suggestion is plausible as a description
of what was, or was believed by Athenians to be, the situation in
Athens. lo
If Perikles' Citizenship Law was not occasioned by a concern
with population, what did motivate it? Some modern scholars
have held that the motivation was narrowly political: Perikles'
political opponents included men whose mothers andlor wives
were not Athenian, most notably the general Kimon." Since
Kimon himself may well have died while serving as Athenian
general in 451 B.c.," and since those sons of Kimon who may
have been born of a marriage to an Arkadian woman retained
Athenian citizenship (Perikles' Law seems not to have been retrospective, as its re-enactment in 40312 B.C. certainly was not), the
facts tell heavily against such an explanation. l 3
More commonly, scholars have taken the law to be antiaristocratic. Marriages to foreign women seem to have been particularly prominent among the Athenian elite, who established
their status outside their own citv and their claims on valuable
material resources elsewhere by these links with families in other
Greek cities. Herodotos tells the story (6.126-31) of Kleisthenes,
the sixth-century tyrant of Sikyon, who married his daughter
Agariste to the Athenian Megakles after holding a year-long
international competition between suitors. Other fathers were not
in a position to scrutinize prospective bridegrooms so closely, but
numerous examples of elite marriages across political boundaries
can be traced.14 Perikles' own mother, Agariste, was the granddaughter of the Sikyonian Agariste after whom she was named.
lo Cf. D. Ogden, Greek Bastardy in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods (Oxford,
1996), 64-9.
l 1 Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, pt 3b (supplement), i, 477-81.
l 2 On the date of death of Kimon, see R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford,
1972), 124-8.
l 3 J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families (Oxford, 1971), 302-5.
l4 L. Gernet, 'The Marriages of Tyrants', in L. Gernet (ed.), The Arrthropologj~of
Ancient Greece (Baltimore, 1981; J.-P. Vernant, 'Marriage', in J.-P. Vernant (ed.),
Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (Brighton, 1980). I discuss Vernant's views
further below.
LAW AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN ATHENS
7
But if such marriages were common in the years before the
Persians Wars, and non-existent after Perikles' Law was passed,
was it Perikles' Law that caused the change? While it is not
difficult to find examples of Athenian men marrying foreign
women in the years down to 480 B.C., examples of such marriages
after 480 are lacking. Since we are in general not well informed
about the identity of wives, the argument from silence is not
strong, but a change in marriage patterns in the early fifth century
would not be difficult to understand. Foreign birth and treachery
are two of the allegations which Athenians scrawled on the potsherds they used to ostracize individual politicians for ten years
(a procedure first used in 487 B.C.), and prominent foreign links
are one of the features that link the various men known to have
been ostracized in the following quarter century. Calling on foreign friends for help had been employed in the sixth century by
Peisistratos to establish himself as tyrant at Athens, by the
Alkmaionidai in their attempts to dislodge the Peisistratid tyranny, and by the political opponent of the democratic reformer
Kleisthenes in his attempts to block those reforms. It would not
be surprising if Athenians as a whole were suspicious of the
foreign connections of members of the elite.
Renouncing foreign brides gave members of the Athenian elite
the opportunity to continue showing off on the international
circuit, while also claiming that they did so not for personal glory,
but for the glory of Athens. Athenians in the sixth century who
competed for honour in the playgrounds of the grand panHellenic festivals, converted athletic success into direct personal
material advantage by exchanging its symbolic capital for a good
marriage. In the fifth century, Athenians could reasonably maintain, as Alkibiades is famously made to do in Thucydides (6.16.2),
that athletic victories brought as much honour to the city of
origin as to the individual.
The belief that the Athenian elite may have grown markedly
less keen on foreign marriages quite independently of Perikles'
Citizenship Law is reinforced by increased Athenian sensitivity
about links of 'ritualized friendship' with men in other cities,
links which were quite unaffected by legislation. Gabriel Herman
has shown how the cross-polis links which guest-friendship
involved came to be seen as potentially subversive to the interests
of the city, and how official state friendships in the form of
proxenies, which did not themselves promote the individual
8
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
1.55
interests of particular wealthy Athenians, were promoted as an
alternative means of maintaining friendly contact with other
cities.15 Perikles himself shows a sensitivity to Athenian suspicion
of the political implications of guest-friendships when he offers
to make over his property to the city in the event that his own
guest-friend, the Spartan king Archidamos, might flagrantly
avoid it during the first Spartan invasion of Attica in the
Peloponnesian War. l6
That the elite may have already decided that it was politic to
forego foreign marriages does not mean that the Athenian people
found the prospects of formally undermining elite links with the
rich and powerful abroad unattractive in 451 B.C. Nevertheless,
Perikles' Law is a rather indirect and partial means of cutting the
elite off from foreign links, and there must be some doubt as to
whether reservations about elite marital behaviour can have been
its sole origin.
It is possible that marriages to non-Athenian women were
coming under material as well as political pressure. Alan
Boegehold has recently proposed that Perikles' Law arose from
successes in inheritance cases by Athenians who argued that descent from two Athenians was better than descent from one, and
should give prior claim to property.17 There was certainly an
Athenian law describing the important religious duties of the wife
of the archon basileus that insisted that she be Athenian and not
foreign ([Demosthenes] 59.75-6). There are also signs that
Athenians with foreign mothers could be treated as a distinct
group before 451 B.C.: Herodotos (5.94) refers to Peisistratos'
son Hegesistratos, born of an Argive woman, as a bastard (nothos),
although other sources make the Argive woman Peisistratos'
properly married wife; similarly, Plutarch (Themistokles, 1)
records that Themistokles was a nothos because he had a foreign
mother, and then connects this claim with the existence o f a
group of nothoi who exercised at the Kynosarges g y m n a ~ i u m . ' ~
G. Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge, 1987).
Thucydides 2.13.1. This is the earliest case of what comes to be recognized as a
standard ploy by enemy generals: see S. Hornblower, A Co~tl~tlentary
on Thucydides:
Vol. 1, Books I-111 (Oxford, 1991), 251.
l7 A. Boegehold, ' "Perikles" Citizenship Law of 45110 B.C.', in A. Boegehold and
A. Scafuro (eds.), Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology (Baltimore, 1994).
l 8 D. Ogden, Greek Bastardy in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods (Oxford, 1996),
44-58, discusses both these cases. He also argues that the 'impure of descent' of
[Aristotle], Constitutzon of the Athenians, 13.5, were the children of foreign mothers
and citizen fathers, and that the law on phratries recorded by Philokhoros (Die
l5
l6
Iconz. onp. 91
LAW AND T H E REPRESENTATION O F WOMEN I N ATHENS
9
Perikles' Law may well have appealed to popular Athenian prejudice, but this far from demonstrates that it was simply a piece of
legal tidiness, a de jure acquiescence to what court decisions had
already made de facto.
The issue of whether Perikles' Citizenship Law was a recognition of realities or an innovation is an important one. Plutarch
(Life of Perikles, 37.3-4) mentions the law in the context of the
removal of non-citizens from the citizen register at the time of
Psammetikhos' gift of grain to Athens in 44514 B.C. Although this
particular connection is highly impla~sible,'~
the suggestion that
the law was deliberately designed to limit future access to the
material and other advantages of being an Athenian citizen is not
without attractions. The Athenian organization of continued
Greek resistance to Persian influence i n Asia Minor and the
Aegean in the Delian League had brought increasing involvement
of Athenians in relatively long-term service abroad. As military
activity declined and as Athens exerted ever tighter control over
her allies, large numbers of Athenians came to reside abroad in
order to administer the cities of what was increasingly an empire,
and to maintain Athenian military control by permanently residing in Athenian settlements on allied territory. Athenian men
who did not belong to the traditional elite thus acquired new
opportunities for forming more or less permanent liaisons with
non-Athenian women. Athens was the elite city within the Delian
League and her insistence on retaining all
of responsibility
within the League
- for her own members meant that all Athenians
were effectively promoted to elite privileges with regard to the
allied cities. Perikles' Citizenship Law prevented personal liaisons
from acquiring political significance, and prevented families in
allied cities from tapping Athenian resources through the citizenchildren of daughters who had married visiting Athenian soldiers
or officials.20
n. 18 conc.
Fragmente dergriechischen Historiker, 328F35) belongs before 451 B.C. and was designed
to protect the rights of aristocratic children of foreign mothers. The former claim
seems to me improbable - one would expect more explicit reference to Kleisthenes'
foreign mother had this been a factor in his political fortunes following the fall of the
tyranny; furthermore, the latter remains far from proven. Even the two cases cited
in my text are less than completely compelling, given the dangers of anachronism,
whether deliberate or accidental, in authors writing after 450 B.C.
l9 Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, pt 3b (supplement), i, 462-70.
20 From then on, Athenian men abroad for long periods, for example as kleroukhs,
could only acquire local wives if they could persuade the Athenians explicitly to allow
them the right of intermarriage, something we know to have happened (only) in the
10
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
15.5
There is little doubt that the position of allied cities with regard
to Athens was becoming more closely defined in the years around
the middle of the fifth century B.C. Our grip on the changing
nature of Athenian overlordship is somewhat tenuous, because of
the dearth of inscriptional evidence for Athenian relations with
her allies prior to the middle of the 450s B.C., but there seems
little doubt that c.450 B.C. Athens began to demand that allies
perform roles normally expected of Athenian citizens, but without
citizen privileges. When the Athenians restored their control to
Erythrai after a revolt, probably c.45312 B.C., they insisted that
the people of Erythrai bring grain to the festival of the Great
Panathenaia." By perhaps 447 B.C. all allies were expected to
provide a cow and a panoply for the Great Panathenaia and,
probably by the middle of the 440s B.C. certain allies, at least,
were having to refer all their capital trials to at hen^.'^
Athenian exclusiveness can be seen also in the development of
the doctrine that Athenians had always lived in Attica and were
not immigrants. This doctrine of autochthony may have been a
specifically fifth-century invention; it was certainly promoted in
the second half of the century in a way it had not been previously.
The idea was perhaps entirely absent from the work of Aiskhylos,
but it is certainly most prominent in tragedy in the works of
Euripides written during the Peloponnesian War (particularly Ion
and Erekhtheus). A staple of Funeral Orations, at least from the
oration which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Perikles in the
winter of 43110 B.C. onwards, the doctrine may indeed have been
first promoted in those speeches over the war dead.23 Although
it acquired a particular force by contrast with the history of the
n. 20 coni.
case of the Euboians (Lysias 34.3) and of the Lemnians, where the law created a
changed situation for Athenians who had been resident on that island since at least
500 B.C. (Isaios 6.13). In neither case are the dates or circumstances of the grant
certain: see further Ogden, Greek Bastardy in the Classzcal and Hellerristic Periods, 70-1.
'' A Selection of Greek Historical Irrscriptiorrs to the End of the Fzyth Century B.C., ed.
R. Meiggs and D. M. Lewis (Oxford, 1969), no. 40.
22 Ibid., nos. 46.41-3, 52.70-6.
23 V. Rosivach, 'Autochthony and the Athenians', Classical Quart., 2nd ser., xxxvii
(1987), has stressed the absence of pre-fifth-century evidence for the doctrine. His
case is further supported by the way that Kleisthenes made Erekhtheus one of the
ten eponymous heroes of his new tribes, something which would hardly have been
possible had Erekhtheus enjoyed in the late sixth century the particular role as father
of all Athenians which he came to enjoy in the later fifth century. On autochthony,
see also N. Loraux, The Children of Athena (Princeton, 1993); N. Loraux, The
Invention of Athens (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 148-50.
LAW AND T H E REPRESENTATION O F WOMEN I N ATHENS
11
invading Dorians in the context of the propaganda battles of the
Peloponnesian War, it was also a doctrine which distinguished
the more ancient Athenians from their Ionian allies in the Delian
League, who were held to have set out from Athens to conquer
the cities they now inhabited.24Equally important was the theoretical basis which autochthony gave to equality between
Athenian citizens.
Perikles' Citizenship Law fits well into this context, whereby
the Athenians advertised their difference from all other Greeks
and expected to demand services from others without giving
rewards in return. It ensured that Athenian relations with those
in other cities were never more than temporary, and that Athenian
relatives were all Athenian. Democracy was in any case hostile
to the claims of kinship and was keen to advertise, as again the
Funeral Orations did (Thucydides, 2.37.1), that merit was the
prerequisite of power and influence. Perikles' Citizenship Law
ensured that claims of kinship would not cross the boundaries of
the city, but also that no amount of merit on the part of those
with whom the Athenians had close political dealings could ever
lead to power or influence at Athens.
I1 CITIZENSHIP AND T H E REPRESENTATION O F WOMEN If the analysis above is correct, Perikles' Citizenship Law was
primarily a symbolic statement. Few Athenians will have had to
change their marital intentions, and all Athenians will have had
their sense of belonging to an exclusive group reinforced. In what
follows, I suggest that this symbolic statement did, however, have
an effect on how the Athenians symbolized their own identity,
by encouraging public acknowledgement of Athenian wives and
mothers. And I suggest that the new symbolic language in turn
affected Athenian attitudes.
Women had a major place in the symbolization of relations
between humanity and the gods in archaic Athens, but virtually
no place at all in the symbolic language in which the loss of human
life was marked.25 Women are very infrequently represented in
Both are mentioned in Thucydides 1.2.
The mentality displayed by archaic grave monuments is most thoroughly explored
by C. Sourvinou-Inwood, 'Reading' Greek Death to the End of the Classical Period
(Oxford, 1995), 140-297.
24
25
12
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
155
Athenian funerary monuments before c.500 B.C. From the midfifth century onwards, however, the symbolic language in which
the dead are commemorated is dominated by women. Women
are very frequently represented, both on Athenian funerary
monuments and on the white-ground lekythoi (oil flasks) which
were deposited in graves.
First the crude data.26 Of the 79 funerary reliefs that G. M.
A. Richter catalogued, 45 figure men (Plate 1) and 3 figure a man
and a woman; none figure just a woman (31 currently figure
neither man nor woman).27Similarly, according to the epigraphic
data collected by L. H. Jeffery, 54 archaic Athenian grave inscriptions commemorate men, 1 commemorates a man and a woman,
6 commemorate women, and in 8 cases the sex is unclear.28 The
relief and free-standing sculptural monuments associated with
these inscriptions figure men in 54 cases, women in 8 cases, and,
in their current state, neither man nor woman in 20 cases.29 Of
figured monuments to the dead, only painted funerary plaques,
depicting actual scenes of mourning and parts of the funerary
ritual, regularly show women (Plate 2).30 Whatever the reason,
women were both rarely commemorated and rarely figured in
sculpted commemorations in sixth-century Attica. This situation
seems to have been exceptional within the Greek world, since
26 With the argument that follows, cf. K. Stears, 'Dead Women's Society:
Constructing Female Gender in Classical Athenian Funerary Sculpture', in N. Spencer
(ed.), Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology: Bridging the 'Great Divide'
(London, 1995), esp. 113.
27 G. M. A. Richter, The Archaic Gravestones ofAttica (London, 1961), nos. 35, 37,
59. Strictly speaking, no. 59 shows a woman with a child, where it is the child who
is the deceased. This stone comes from Anavyssos, as also did the stele by the same
sculptor showing two young men, one deceased, not known to Richter: J. Frel, Death
of a Hero (Malibu, 1982).
28 L. H. Teffrev, 'The Inscribed Gravestones of Attica', Annual of the British School
at Athens, lvii (1962).
29 I exclude kouroi of uncertain provenance from these figures.
Reliefs and freestanding sculptures construe death in rather different ways, but my aim is to show
that all the various sculptural representations of death equally eliminate women in
archaic Attica. On the difference between reliefs and kouroi, see A. M. D'Onofrio,
'Aspetti e problemi del monument0 funerario attico arcaico', AION, x (1988).
30 J. Boardman, 'Painted Funerary Plaques and Some Remarks on Prothesis', Annual
of the British School at Athens, 1 (1955), catalogues 39 plaques or plaque series, in 37
of which it is possible to determine the sex of the figures shown: only women appear
in 10, only men in 9, and women and men together in 18. For the relatively unchanging
imagery of funerary ritual on vases, see D. C. Kurtz, 'Vases for the Dead, an Attic
Selection 750-400 B.C.', in H. A. G. Brijder (ed.), Ancient Greek and Related Pottery
(Amsterdam, 1984).
1. Stele of Aristion from Velanideza in Attica, last quarter of sixth century B.C.
(Athens National Museum [29])
(Courtesy of Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich)
14
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
155
funerary reliefs of women survive from a number of other
archaic cities. 31
Around 500 B.C. Athenians stopped putting monumental
markers on graves. The reasons for this are not entirely clear: it
is possible that legislation referred to, but not exactly dated, by
Cicero (De Legibus, 2.26.64-5) may be relevant; more general
resistance to elitist display in the young democracy may also have
been a factor. When funerary reliefs reappear in the archaeological record, at a date that is disputed but probably in the third
quarter of the fifth century, they look very different (Plate 3).
Among the monuments depicting adults in C. W. Clairmont's
recent catalogue of classical Athenian tombstones, there are 628
monuments figuring women, 468 figuring men and 1136 figuring
both men and women.32Women outnumber men in all the various
compositional formations: among reliefs featuring just one figure
there are 131 women and 117 men; where reliefs have two adults,
there are 241 cases where both are female as against 187 where
both are male; where reliefs have three adults, there are 66 cases
where all three are women, 29 where all three are men, and so
on. Only in the case of reliefs showing children on their own do
males outnumber females: where one child appears, that child is
male in 80 cases, female in 49.33 What is more, the change
B. S. Ridgway, The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture (Princeton, 1977), 164, 174,
176; also monuments from Crete: J. Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period
(London, 1978), figs. 246, 252 (this last is not certainly funerary). Note also D. C.
Kurtz and J. Boardman, Greek Burial Customs (London, 1972), 220-2. For a small
corpus with a pattern which does seem similar to that at Athens, see P. M. Fraser,
Rhodian Funerary Monurnents (Oxford, 1977), 8-9.
C. W. Clairmont, Classical Attic Tombstones, 6 vols. (Kilchberg, 1993). I have
not counted monuments which are cross-listed by Clairmont.
33 The full statistical breakdown is as follows: stelai with one standing figure: figure
male 97, figure female 101; stelai with one seated figure: figure male 15, figure female
30; stelai with single figure kneeling or on horseback: 5 male; stelai with one adult
and one child: adult male 74, adult female 96; stelai with two adults: both male 187,
both female 241; stelai with one male and one female: 428; stelai with two adults plus
child(ren): adults both male 54, adults both female 78, one male one female 120;
stelai with three adults: all male 29, two male and one female 157, two female and
one male 231, three female 66; stelai with three adults plus child(ren): adults all male
2, two male and one female 31, two female and one male 45, all female 11; stelai with
four adults: all male 3, three male one female 21, two male and two female 47, three
female and one male 29, all female 2; stelai with four adults plus child(ren): adults
all male 0, three male and one female 0, two male and two female 6, three female
and one male 9, four female 2; stelai with five adults: all male 0, four male and one
female 0, three male and two female 1, three female and two male 4, four female and
one male 0, all female 1; stelai with five adults plus child(ren): three male adults and
two female 1, four male and one female 1; stelai with six adults: four female and two
male 1, three female and three male 1; stelai with six adults plus child(ren): five
'*
fconz. onp. 16)
Scale in inches
2. Fragment of a funerary plaque by Exekias, middle of the sixth century B.C.:
dead woman on bief with a woman mourner by her head.
(Staatliche Museen, Berlin p18111)
(Courtesy of Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin -Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
16
PAST AND PRESENT
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155
in emphasis is apparent from the earliest fifth-century
monuments.34
This sculptural evidence can be extended, and perhaps corroborated, by the evidence from the iconography of the whiteground lekythoi. Although lekythoi in other techniques, both
black-figure and red-figure, and pots of other shapes were deposited in graves, it is lekythoi with scenes painted on a white ground
that seem to have been most closely associated with burial: not
only are white-ground lekythoi found only in graves, but also
their iconography is dominated by scenes relevant to death and
burial. A breakdown, by gender and type of scene, of the images
on white-ground lekythoi catalogued by J. D. Beazley broadly
charts the chronological change in the iconography of these flasks
from about 470 B.C. to the end of the fifth century (Table).35
The earliest white-ground lekythoi, which may not have been
exclusively funerary in use, show a more-or-less even distribution
between men and women, but women predominate in the work
of Beazley's 'Painters of Slight Lekythoi', which includes a large
number of figures of Victory and 'white lekythoi'. The Sabouroff
Painter, active around 460 B.C., most frequently shows men and
women, and has as many lekythoi with just men as with just
women. But on the white-ground lekythoi of the Achilles Painter,
most of which seem to date to after 450 B.C., women are in the
majority (Plate 4). There are also more women on the slightly
later lekythoi of the Phiale Painter (Plate 5) and his contemporaries, who are considerably fonder of scenes of women at tombs
than the Achilles Painter.36 The latest lekythoi catalogued by
;ri.
33 conr.,
female adults and one male 1, three female and three male 1; stelai with seven adults:
six female and one male 1.
"Richter, Archaic Gravestones of Attica, 54 n. 12, lists five reliefs as Periklean: three
figure women, and two men.
35 J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vases, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1963). 'Myth' here
includes personifications. All scenes figuring Nikai, Charon, Maenads, Hermes, Sleep
and Death, have been classified as 'myth'. Figures of the living and the deceased
cannot be systematically distinguished: J. Bazant, 'Entre le croyance et l'experience:
le mort sur les lecythes a fond blanc', in L. Kahil, C. Auge and P. Linant de Bellefonds
(eds.), Iconographic classique et idelltitis rigionales (BCH Supplement, xiv, Paris, 1986).
It is notable that only women and children, and never adult males, are shown with
Charon the ferryman who takes the souls of the dead over the Styx: C. SourvinouInwood, 'Images grecques de la mort: representations, imaginaire, histoire', AION,
ix (1987).
36 Cf. the similar but differently divided statistics in D. C. Kurtz, 'Mistress and
Maid', AION, x (l988), 145. On the Achilles Painter, cf. the remarks of F. Lissarrague,
'La Stele avant la lettre', AION, x (1988), 102: 'These lekythoi, totalling almost 60
~corir.onp. 1 8 ,
3. Stele of Hegeso and a maid, from Athens, c.400 B.C.
(Athens National Museum [3624])
(Courtesy of Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich)
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
155
TABLE
IMAGES ON WHITE-GROUND LEKYTHOI (C.470-400 B.C.)*
Mythic Scenes
Non-Mythic Scenes
&&
Beazley Chapters
Men Women Both Men Women Both
Chs. 21, 36-8
11
14
2
22
25
0
86
1
54
2
21
Ch. 39
12
Ch. 40
4
5
3
73
162
26
9
0
22
28
72
1
Ch. 46
Ch. 50
0
2
1
4
74
33
20
16
6
1
2
Chs. 51, 53, 58, 61
4
62
159
Ch. 64
18
0
2
32
Ch. 74
20
0
6
29
36
200
*Source: J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vases, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1963), ch. 21,
'Painters of Small Vases'; ch. 36, 'The Villa Builia Painter and his Group'; ch. 37,
'Painters of Nolans and Lekythoi'; ch. 39, 'Painters of Slight Lekythoi and Alabastra';
ch. 40, 'White Lekythoi'; ch. 46, 'The Sabouroff Painter'; ch. 50, 'The Achilles
Painter'; ch. 51, 'The Phiale Painter'; ch. 53, 'Other Classic Pot-Painters'; ch. 58,
'Other Classic Pot-Painters'; ch. 61, 'Painters of Lekythoi'; ch. 64, 'Classic Painters
of White Lekythoi'; ch. 74, 'Late Fifth-Century Painters of White Lekythoi'.
Beazley mainly show men and women (particularly 'youth and
woman at a tomb'), but scenes depicting only women still outnumber those of only men. Throughout the history of whiteground lekythoi, mythic scenes never decorated more than
a minority of pots; consequently, mythical women make a
negligible contribution to women's overall iconographic
predominance.
These data show that women were acceptable objects of representation on Athenian classical grave monuments and on vases
associated with burial in a way that they were not acceptable in
Athenian archaic grave monuments. Thus, Athens rejoined other
Greek cities that had never adopted the Athenian iconographic
limitation of representing only men, even when they had adopted
the peculiar form of archaic Athenian reliefs.37 Two questions
arise: first, why does Athens differ from other cities in its archaic
~n 36 corrr
in number, have an iconography that is essentially feminine - musical scenes,
domestic scenes, scenes of preparation for visits to the tomb. Scenes showing the
funerary stele are much rarer, just 18 examples, and in 15 of those at least one woman
is shown at the tomb, carrying offerings'.
37 Note B. S. Ridgway, The Severe Style in Greek Sculpture (Princeton, 1970), 45-8,
51: 'funerary stelai stop in Attica but spread elsewhere in the Attic format. Yet the
content, with its intimacy and its representations from real life, seems m direct
continuation of Ionic tradition, or at least alien to earlier Attic gravestones' (51).
4. Woman and departing warrior: white-ground lekythos found at Eretria
and attributed to the Achilles Painter, c.440 B.C.
(Athens National Museum [1818])
(Courtesy of Himer Fotoarchiv, Munich)
20
PAST AND PRESENT
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155
practices? and secondly, why does Athens change her own practices between the archaic and classical periods?
Classical Athens was more repressive in its dealings with
women than other Greek cities, particularly in matters of property
rights: Athenian women could not acquire property contractually
or deal with it, and are not found among Athenian landowners,
moneylenders or slave owners.38 These limitations on women's
rights were already in place in the sixth century B.C., and in
explaining women's different place in archaic Athenian funerary
monuments this difference in legal status would make a promising
place to start. But since the legal position of women in Athens
did not change significantly between the sixth and the fourth
centuries, I shall concentrate in this article on the question of
why women's place changed in Athenian funerary monuments.
Whatever the reasons for Athens keeping women peculiarly
tightly restricted in the archaic period, I suggest that it is the
classical decision to bring women into the fore in funerary
imagery, while not at all relaxing the restrictions on women's
rights, which most urgently demands explanation.
We might posit three possible changes in Athens: changes in
attitudes to women, attitudes to death, or in artistic habits. Only
those who subscribe to the view that art has its own momentum
which is independent of society at large will be attracted by the
last possibility. It has been suggested that it was the surplus of
sculptural skill released by the completion of the Parthenon project which brought about the reinvention of the sculpted grave
relief at Athens, but such an explanation cannot explain the
iconography adopted in those stelai: males predominate in the
Parthenon frieze, which is stylistically closest to the early ~ t e l a i . ~ ~
Can some change in attitudes to death explain the new prominence of women? Archaic reliefs tend to focus on the life lived:
the hoplite (Plate 1) or the athlete is paraded before our eyes.
Archaic free-standing sculptural monuments for dead men take
the form of kouroi: naked male figures with feet flat on the
ground, one leg advanced, hands by their sides and face staring
directly ahead. Here the sculpture gives no sense of the
38 See the succinct statement by G. E. M. de Ste Croix, 'Some Observations on the
Property Rights of Athenian Women', Classical Rev., 2nd ser., xx (1970); D. M.
Schaps, Economic Rights of Women zn Ancient Greece (Edinburgh, 1979), esp. ch. 7.
Schaps stresses the gap between law and practice in the classical evidence.
39 For that explanation, see C. M. Robertson, A History of Greek Art (Cambridge,
1975), 365.
5. Dead woman shown beside her own tomb which is being visited by another woman.
White-ground lekythos found at Oropos and attributed
to the Phiale Painter, c.440-30 B.C.
(Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich)
(Courtesy of Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich)
22
PAST AND PRESENT
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individual's achievements, but the invitation to the viewer to
'stand and weep', which is found on some of the inscriptions
accompanying funerary kouroi, is not inappropriate: the male
viewer finds his gaze mirrored by a figure with whom he shares
everything except his death.40 Virtually no classical monuments
figure a 'context-free' individual in the way the archaic kouroi
do, and only a few classical grave reliefs, such as those which
show cavalrymen in action, focus on the achievements of the life
lived. The vast majority invoke the social setting of the deceased
by showing a man talking with his contemporaries or in a domestic
setting, or a woman with her family or another female in attendance (Plate 6). By putting the figure of the deceased into a setting
in which relationships rather than actions are most prominent,
the classical reliefs do not so much commemorate the achievements of a life as register the scale and nature of the loss to
others, and
to the family circle. These are scenes
which are easily universalized and they speak the language of
virtue which is a public language, as associated funerary epigrams
make clear.41 If we are seeking an explanation of the change in
iconographical emphasis in terms of changing attitudes to death,
then it would seem to entail a shift from seeing death as ending
the more-or-less public achievements of an individual, to seeing
death as disrupting the face-to-face society of family and friends.42
We might want to go further than this. The emphasis which
J. Reilly has laid on the connections between the iconography of
'mistress and maid' scenes on white-ground lekythoi and the
iconography of marriage also has implications for the 'mistress
and maid' iconography which is common in grave stelai
(Plate 3).43These scenes do not simply evoke the household from
40 I depart here from the views expressed by Sourvinou-Inwood, 'Reading' Greek
Death, 252-4, for whom the nakedness of kouroi is the nakedness of the athlete. That
thesis seems to me difficult to sustain considering that athleticism is marked in reliefs
by the addition of an attribute, particularly an aryballos (266).
4 1 See G. Hoffmann, 'La Jeune Fille et la mort: quelques steles a epigramme', AION,
x (1988).
42 Cf. R. G. Osborne, 'Death Revisited, Death Revised: The Death of the Artist
in Archaic and Classical Greece', A r t Hist., xi (1988), and Sourvinou-Inwood, 'Reading'
Greek Death, 247, on the way fifth-century scenes conflate Charon (the boatman who
conveys souls across the Styx) and a visit to the tomb to represent 'death seen as both
a personal experience and a family affair'.
43 J. Reilly, 'Many Brides: "Mistress and Maid" on Athenian Lekythoi', Hesperia,
lviii (1989). See also I. Jenkins, 'Is There Life after Marriage? A Study of the
Abduction Motif in Vase Paintings of the Athenian Wedding Ceremony', Bull. Instit.
Classical Studies, xxx (1983); Kurtz, 'Mistress and Maid'; R.-M. Moesch, 'Le Mariage
et la mort sur les loutrophores', AION, x (1988).
6. Marble grave marker in shape of a lekythos, from Salamis, c.375 B.C.
(Glyptothek, Munich [498])
(Courtesy of Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich)
24
PAST AND PRESENT
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155
which the deceased woman has gone. They invite comparison
between the departure from the marital household in death and
departure from the natal household in marriage and, in doing so,
they also evoke the sense of promise cut short by portraying the
woman at her most promising.
What archaic grave monuments there were to women seem to
have taken the form of korai, the female equivalent of the
kouroi, and to have made the link between marriage and death.
Korai were standing figures of young women, variously and
often elaborately clothed, usually with some object or offering
in one hand, staring straight ahead. They were much used as
dedications in sanctuaries, where it is attractive to see not only
the offering held, but also the nubile woman herself, as symbolizing the exchange between men and the gods.44 The two korai
known to have been used as grave markers in Attica both
explicitly connect death and marriage. In the case of the kore
now in Berlin (Plate 7 ) ) the link is made by the pomegranate
that the figure holds in her right hand. The pomegranate was a
symbol of fertility, but it also had mythological associations with
death: it was eating a pomegranate while abducted to Hades that
prevented Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter and
also known as Kore, from returning permanently to life above
earth.45 In the case of the kore monument for Phrasikleia, the
link is made by the epigram which declares that she 'will always
remain a kore having obtained that name from the gods instead
of marriage'.46
In as far as classical stelai exploit the analogy between
marriage and death, they only take up something which had
been available also in archaic monuments. That finding is further
supported by literary evidence. There too the link between
death and marriage is prominent, but although we know it most
clearly from tragedies written in the second half of the fifth
century B.C., it is apparent that it was already present in plays
R. G. Osborne, 'Does the Sculpted Girl Speak to Women Too?', in I. Morris
(ed.), Classical Greece: Ancient History and Modern Archaeology (Cambridge, 1994),
92-5; cf. Sourvinou-Inwood, 'Reading' Greek Death, 244-6.
45 In the iconography of the classical lekythoi and reliefs it is curious that no use is
made of the parallel with Persephone, just as no allusion is made to either Dionysiac
or other mystery cults which were interested in the afterlife: S. G. Cole, 'Voices from
beyond the Grave: Dionysus and the Dead', in T. H. Carpenter and C. A. Faraone
(ed.), Masks of Dionysus (Ithaca, 1993).
I~zscriptionesGraecae, i3, 1261.
1
7. Kore from Keratea, c.550 B.C.
(Staatliche Museen, Berlii [1800])
of Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin -Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
26
PAST AND PRESENT
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early in the century.47 The story of Alkestis, who agrees to
submit to an early death herself in order that her husband should
be exempt from death altogether, was put on stage by Phrynikhos
in the first quarter of the fifth century; it figures similarly in the
extant play by Euripides, which dates from the third quarter of
the century. If changing ways of thinking about death lie behind
the new prominence of women on grave monuments, it can only
be a case of new emphasis, not of the adoption of some view of
death that had been unheard of in the sixth century.
If we turn to attitudes to women, what change in attitudes to
women would adequately explain the new iconography? There
was no general reluctance to put women on display in works of
art in archaic Athens. The Athenian Acropolis displayed numerous dedications in the form of korai, and women also appeared
in Athenian votive reliefs. It would seem, therefore, not to be
women that the society was loathe to display, but the death of
women, which it rarely regarded as worthy of prominent commemoration. Should the move from commemoration of individual
achievements to the marking of loss and the disruption of the
family be seen as consequent upon a change in attitude towards
women? Where individual achievements in the public eye are
seen as most important, in a society where public life is the
preserve of men, men rather than women are bound to be the
focus of attention. Where the family group is important, both
women and men are likely to be commemorated. Women might
appear in dedicatory sculpture because their exchange in marriage
conveniently figures the exchange with the gods. They would be
absent from archaic funerary monuments, however, because individually they played no role which it was important for the society
as a whole to commemorate. They would appear in classical grave
sculpture because the qualification for commemoration was no
longer individual achievement for the society at large, but the
role played within the family and immediate social group.
I have explored two possible types of explanation for the
changing prominence of women in sculpted grave monuments at
Athens: first, that it became much more common for death to be
thought of as a force disrupting the family group, perhaps like a
47 R. Seaford, 'The Tragic Wedding', J l Heller~ic Studies, cvii (1987); R. Rehm,
Marriage ro Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy
(Princeton, 1994). The unity of wedding and funeral in Euripides' Alkesris is brought
out most clearly at lines 918-22.
LAW AND THE REPRESENTATION O F WOMEN IN ATHENS
27
second marriage, rather than simply as something ending the
achievements of an individual life; and secondly, that what was
seen as important about individuals came to be less what they
achieved personally on the city stage, and more what they contributed to the constituent elements of the city, the households. As
a result, therefore, women came to be more highly valued and
so more readily commemorated. Is it possible to demonstrate the
plausibility, or otherwise, of either explanation?
Funerary display was a political matter. Concern for the impact
of elaborate funerals is reflected in Solon's legislation to curb
funerary display, and the subsequent law referred to by Cicero
attests a concern about funerary r n o n ~ m e n t s .Whether
~~
as a
direct result of the law or not, sculpted funerary monuments
disappear from the archaeological record around the end of the
sixth century B.C. When they reappear in the second half of the
fifth century B.C., we must suppose that, whether or not the law
had been repealed, public concern had lessened. Did fifth-century
funerary reliefs differ from sixth-century monuments in ways
that would make them less politically offensive to the city?
The problem with sixth-century funerary monuments cannot
have been an objection to marking past lives as such. Increased
deposition of painted pottery in tombs actually makes graves
more visible archaeologically just at the moment that sculpted
monuments disappear.49 Moreover, at least from the 460s B.C.
onwards, the city itself erected monuments to those who died in
war. The objection must have been to the sort of monuments put
up in the sixth century. Sixth-century monuments primarily commemorate the deaths of young rneny5Oand they most commonly
commemorate them by evoking the world of the gymnasium.
The disappearance of archaic sculpted monuments coincides with
the arrival of democracy, and it is not difficult to see that the
young democracy might view these commemorations of the lifestyle of wealthy young men as potentially divisive, points around
which family groups might be rallied with politically subversive
intent. Objecting to individual display and encouraging all
b S P l ~ t a r ~ Life
h , of Solon, 21.5; Cicero, De Legibus, 2.26.63-5. See further R.
Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State
(Oxford, 1994), 74-86.
j9 I. Morris, Burial andAncient Society: The Rise o f t h e Greek City-Stare (Cambridge,
1987), 73, fig. 22; I. Morris, 'Everyman's Grave', in Boegehold and Scafuro (eds.),
Athenian Identitj~and Civic Ideology.
On this point, see esp. Sourvinou-Inwood, 'Reading' Greek Death, 285-94.
28
PAST AND PRESENT
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Athenians to ape those aspects of elite burial which they could
afford to copy seem perfectly consistent. If classical grave reliefs
promoted a vision of death which stressed not the lifestyle of the
jeunesse dore'e but the disruption caused to the family by the loss
of an individual member, then that vision might well be seen as
less hostile to democracy. It might indeed be seen to promote
democracy, since such losses were paralleled in all households,
poor as well as rich.
If funerary display was political, so too, as we have seen, was
marriage. The end of the archaic sculpted funerary monument
more or less coincides with the end of high profile marriages
between the Athenian elite and the elites of other Greek cities.
J.-P. Vernant noted: 'In the Athens of the period after
Cleisthenes, matrimonial unions no longer have as their object
the establishment of relationships of power or of mutual service
between great autonomous families; rather, their purpose is to
perpetuate the households, that is to say the domestic hearths
that constitute the city, in other words to ensure, through strict
rules governing marriage, the permanence of the city itself
through constant r e p r o d u c t i ~ n ' .Because
~~
family links and family
claims to fame had traditionally been a basis for asserting political
power, the democratic city had an interest in the nature of matrimonial unions, just as it had an interest in the nature of funerary
display. Because claims to belong to the city, like claims to belong
to a particular family, depended on descent and hence on marriage, politically acceptable marriage and politically acceptable
domestic relations needed to be promoted.
But if the elite began to change their marriage patterns soon
after the inception of democracy, it is only after 450 B.C., rather
than after 507 B.C., that emphasis on women and the household
becomes apparent in the archaeological record. As we have seen,
women dominate the iconography of white-ground lekythoi from
about 460 B.C., and they dominate classical grave stelai from their
reappearance sometime in the third quarter of the fifth century.
That women in a domestic context should appear for the first
time in Athenian grave monuments in the second half of the fifth
century simply as a trickle-down effect from legislation in the
last decade of the sixth century seems highly improbable. We
need a further trigger some time in the middle of the fifth century.
51
Vernant, 'Marriage', 50.
LAW AND T H E REPRESENTATION O F WOMEN I N ATHENS
29
The changed pattern of elite marriage became embodied in
legislation with Perikles' Citizenship Law of 451 B.C. If Kleisthenic democracy asserted the reproductive function of marriage
at the expense of marriage as a way of enhancing status or forging
diplomatic links (among other things), the law made it important
to identify exactly who the marriage was to and who the mother
of the legitimate children was. It was no longer just politic to
avoid having a foreign wife: advertising the identity, citizen status
and marriage of parents became vital to maintaining one's own
status.
But how could a claim to citizen status be advertised in a
democratic city? To publicize one's father in death as in life was,
in a patrilineal society, to promote the family line. Democratic
Athens took its opposition to claims based on lineage so far as to
suppress patronymics on public monuments to the war dead.
Advertising the particular identity of the father is something
which the Aristotelian tradition holds Kleisthenes himself to have
been worried
in any case, once both parents had to be
citizens, advertising one's father's identity was no longer sufficient. By insisting that the household conform to a specific model,
Perikles' Law effectively sanctioned the display of conformity.
The classic grave stele provided a means for that display that had
unique advantages. To promote one's wife and the mother of
one's children appropriately drew attention to the household as
an ephemeral unit rather than as a long lineage. But in a society
where women of status were not displayed to unrelated men
except in the controlled circumstances of religious festivals,
opportunities to draw public attention to wives and mothers were
few. The death of a wife or mother became the prime moment
for advertising her identity and anchoring claims-to citizenship:
death and marriage acquired a political as well as a structural
c o n n e c t i ~ n .Grave
~~
reliefs, which were private monuments
5 2 Cf. [Aristotle], Constitution of theilthenians, 21.4, with T. F. Winters, 'Kleisthenes
and Athenian Nomenclature', Jl Hellenic Studies, ciii (1993), 162-5.
53 Many funerary monuments figuring women, including some early ones, are to
metics, who would not have had the same political interests; however, the pressures
on the metic community to conform to local practice, and indeed the expectations of
sculptural workshops, will have ensured that metic monuments were shaped iathe
image of citizen monuments. That classical Athenian monuments share many iconographical features with those of the cities from which metics came will have made
conforming further to Athenian citizen practice unproblematic. Metic monuments do
not emphasize metic status; rather than employing official nomenclature, which
referred to the deme of residence of the metic, the reliefs identify metics by their
ethnics.
30
PAST AND PRESENT
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155
displayed to the public at large, often in family enclosures within
the cemetery, provided the opportunity to display a female relative's identity without breaching those protocols which otherwise
surrounded the naming of women.54
The date at which women become dominant on white-ground
lekythoi supports the view that Perikles' Citizenship Law only
instantiated the logic implicit in earlier democratic arrangements;
however, the date at which sculpted grave reliefs reappear suggests that it might nevertheless have played a major part in
bringing about a distinctly female dominance of figurative
memorials to the dead. Did it also effect a revolution in the lives
of women themselves?
The contrast between the experience of visiting a sixth-century
B.C. Athenian cemetery, dominated by images of athletic young
men and the occasional older warrior (Plate I), and the experience
of visiting a late fifth-century B.C. cemetery, dominated by
domestic scenes and by women (Plate 3), is marked. The depredations made on Athenian cemeteries in the interests of the rapid
building of fortifications after the Persian Wars meant that no
Athenian would have had this 'before-and-after' experience, but
the sculpted and painted funerary images cannot but have
impressed their ideals upon those who regularly observed them
none the less.
Funerary monuments ascribed status and value, and established
expectations. In the late fifth century B.C. those expectations
firmly embedded the woman in the household and offered her
only a heavily gender-stereotyped role. But because the same
reliefs so often displayed men with women, and also displayed
men in a domestic context, they laid down markers of the partnership between men and women in the home and their joint role
in defending and perpetuating the city. We should contemplate
the possibility that the changing appearance of the cemetery may
have begun by changing the representations of women, but that
it became a means of changing attitudes towards women. Can the
change from living in a society where images of women were
never present in cemeteries to living in one where women were
predominant have failed to raise issues which went well beyond
the legal question of whether a woman was born to Athenian
54 The protocols changed on the death of a woman, but were not abolished: D.
Schaps, 'The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and K'omen's Names', Classical
Quart., 2nd ser., xxvii (1977).
LAW AND THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN ATHENS
31
parents, and hence a possible wife for a man born of Athenian
parents?
If classical grave reliefs mark, in part, a politically occasioned
change in emphasis in attitudes to women, this should be visible
in other aspects of Athenian self-expression. It is unfortunate
that among all the rich remains of fifth-century Athenian literature only the tragedies of Aiskhylos date to before the middle of
the century. The literary factors shaping the works of the tragedians are complex, and comparisons between the work of
Aiskhylos before, and the work of Sophocles and Euripides after,
Perikles' Citizenship Law are thus perilous in the extreme.
Certain observations can be offered, nevertheless.
Running through the whole of fifth-century tragedy is a 'disruptive interplay of civic and familial discourses in which the
specific roles of women play an essential part'.55 Powerful female
figures are to be found in Aiskhylos as much as in later writers,
and issues of marriage dominate Aiskhylos' Persians and Suppliant
Wornen, as they later dominate Euripides' Medea and Hippolytos.
Women's involvement in ritual, though not a major concern in
Aiskhylos extant plays, is well-attested in surviving fragments of
early tragedy, as well as in Euripides' Bacchae. It is as true of
the plays of Sophokles as it is of Aiskhylos' Oresteia that the
household is shown to be essentially linked to, and understood in
relation to, the wider society of the city.56Against these continuities, however, we might ask whether it is by chance that it is
Aiskhylos' Oresteia that has become the classic text for discussions
of patriarchy, outside the study of classics as well as within it.57
Is it simply coincidence that the classic comparison between the
man standing in the line of battle and the woman bearing the
pain of childbirth, which brings out the way in which the woman
too fights for the city by producing the citizens of the future,
comes in Euripides (Medea, 250-1)?58 Part of the 'deglamorization' of myth59 in Euripides involves building up illusions of
reality in which mythical women are presented in domestic contexts: mark the contrast between the homely setting which
Euripides provides for his Elektra, and the setting of Elektra in
S. D. Goldhill, Readtng Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), 115. Ibzd., 152-3. 57 Ibzd., 51-6. N. Loraux, The Experzence of Tezrestas: The Femzntne and the Greek M a n
(Princeton, 1995), 23-44.
5 9 W. G. Arnott, 'Double the Vision: A Reading of Euripides' Electra', Greece and
Rome, xxviii (1981), 181.
55
56
32
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
155
Aiskhylos Choephoroi, a play with which Euripides directly invites
comparison. The public presentation of illusions of domestic reality on stage directly parallels the display of the household at home
in the grave reliefs. The possibility should at least be entertained
that the greater prominence of domesticity, and the greater
importance of the Athenian wife, may have encouraged such
changing tragic images.
CONCLUSION
In 45110 B.C. an Athenian mother was added to the official
requirements for Athenian citizenship. This requirement may
well have been presented as a democratic move, clipping the
romantic politics of the elite, though these were in fact largely a
thing of the past; it may well also have appealed to popular
prejudice against men with non-Athenian mothers and have coincided with arguments in the law-courts that men with two
Athenian parents should have priority in inheritance. The law
certainly fitted in with other moves by the Athenians to establish
their exclusiveness and superiority over other Greeks, and particularly over their allies in the Delian League. The very variety
of possible reasons for voting for Perikles' Citizenship Law may
itself have been a factor in seeing it passed.
Whatever factors contributed to the conception and passage of
the law, I have tried to show that the effects of the legislation
extended well beyond what anyone involved was likely to have
foreseen. Formal exclusion of non-Athenian mothers from
Athenian political society led to an emphasis on Athenian wives
and mothers, and brought women literally into the public eye:
men secured their own claims to citizen status by advertising that
their wives and mothers conformed to the ideals of Athenian
womanhood, and that their homes were models of domestic regularity, unsullied by the exotic. Such advertisement reinforced the
stereotype of the Athenian woman but it also promoted the
domestic setting as the chief source of citizen status and made it
acceptable to put the man, so frequently previously figured in
the gymnasium or on the field of battle, back into that setting.
By doing so the agenda of masculinity was alteredY6O
the household
b0 I explore the changing agenda of masculinity further in 'Sculpted Men of Athens:
Masculinity and Power in the Field of Vision', in L. Foxhall and J. Salmon (ed.),
Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Sey-Representation in the Classical Tradition
(London, 1997).
LAW AND THE REPRESENTATION O F WOMEN IN ATHENS
33
acquired a new and different place in Athenian ideology and, if
women's work itself remained essentially unaltered, it had at least
ceased to be unseen and unsung.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Robin Osborne
http://www.jstor.org
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Law, the Democratic Citizen and the Representation of Women in Classical Athens
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Past and Present, No. 155. (May, 1997), pp. 3-33.
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[Footnotes]
7
Do Bureaucratic Politics Matter?: Some Disconfirming Findings from the Case of the U.S.
Navy
Edward Rhodes
World Politics, Vol. 47, No. 1. (Oct., 1994), pp. 1-41.
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23
Autochthony and the Athenians
Vincent J. Rosivach
The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 37, No. 2. (1987), pp. 294-306.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-8388%281987%292%3A37%3A2%3C294%3AAATA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R
38
Some Observations on the Property Rights of Athenian Women
G. E. M. de Ste. Croix
The Classical Review, New Ser., Vol. 20, No. 3. (Dec., 1970), pp. 273-278.
Stable URL:
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43
Many Brides: "Mistress and Maid" on Athenian Lekythoi
Joan Reilly
Hesperia, Vol. 58, No. 4. (Oct. - Dec., 1989), pp. 411-444.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-098X%28198910%2F12%2958%3A4%3C411%3AMB%22AMO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q
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54
The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women's Names
David Schaps
The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 27, No. 2. (1977), pp. 323-330.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-8388%281977%292%3A27%3A2%3C323%3ATWLMEA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6
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